Game of Thrones season 3 on track for late March release

Game of Thrones fans will be happy to know that the various setbacks that have beset the multiple production teams around the world making Season 3 of this awesome series will not affect the planned 31st of March release date.

Season 3 covers the first half of the third book of the seven book epic called “A Song of Fire and Ice” (of which the last two books are yet to be completed). This new season is reported as being by far the best season of the three by those involved in the production.

Interviews with the directors and actors (over at Westeros.org) indicate that the locations found and the sets built for season 3 are a visual feast. Also the new costumes that have been made for the third season are stunning. However they do point out that season 3 does take some additional focus and concentration by the viewer due to the density of the material crammed into the books by George Martin and the new characters that are introduced in almost every episode.

So about mid-February it might be time to start re-viewing season 1 and season 2 so you are primed and ready for season 3 when it starts to release.

I can’t recall if the mammoths used in the attack against ‘the wall’ are in the first half or the second half of the book—I have read the third book (as an audio book). I am pretty sure it is the first half. It will be interesting to see how they do mammoths on the screen.

Oh, and if you downloaded season 2 ‘free’ from somewhere last year in order to watch it as soon as possible and you have not yet bought the DVD or BluRay box set then I implore you to go and buy it. I see that the DVD version is down to $59.98 at JB Hi Fi (for those readers in Australia). Seriously, if we’all don’t pay money to see this so HBO get some decent profit from it then the chances of HBO funding season 4 (the second half of the third book) will nosedive. They don’t put up tens of millions to make it just to make people feel good! They do it to make money! Sad but true . . .

The picture above is of Sophie Turner who plays the part of Sansa Stark. I can tell you from my reading of book three that Sansa gets into a few adventures in this next season, although some of them might be in the second half of the book.

Update >>>

After doing some more lurking around the Web for stuff about Game of Thrones season 3 I found out that in order to cover the huge amount of material in the first half of book three each of first nine episodes will be ‘super-sized’. Each of the first nine season 3 episodes will run for an additional four to five minutes. The final and tenth episode will be about ten minutes longer.

It will be interesting to see how this is handled by Australian free-to-air where they have to slot in advertising. Or maybe, just maybe, none of the free-to-air broadcasters will pick Game of Thrones season 3 up and it will only be on pay TV (where they can be much more flexible with inserted advertising)? Could be.